Hundreds of journalists have descended on Perugia for the International Journalism Festival 2014, including the Media Innovation Studio’s Clare Cook.

The Italian venue plays host to dozens of talks #ijf14 per day for the five-day event.

Pier Luca Santoro of datamediahub.it

From the UK and our digital circles the line-up this year included:

Claire Wardle presented her latest research for Tow Digital Center on user generated content, and notes from the session can be found here.

Joanna Geary was also here as head of new partnerships for Twitter UK

Martin Belam, fresh from visiting the Media Innovation Studio for some Trinity Mirror training, shared thoughts on ampp3d and the growth of new story forms, while Nicholas Whitaker – media outreach lead at Google –  shared a workshop on Google searching trends and tips.

Pier Luca Santoro from the Datamedia Hub shared some great motivations for why newsrooms should deploy more ramification strategies (see Clare’s Storify on the session ) and Steve Buttry talked about the difficulties in the journey for media innovation.

Social Media and UGC editor Fergus Bell shared issues around verification at the Associated Press and Andy Carvin continued his crusade for collaborative processes

Mariana Santos at the Knight International journalism fellow inspired with her talks of female data journalism campaigners in Columbia, while Tow Centre director Emily Bell talked business models with Felix Salmon from Reuters and Raju Nrisetti, senior vice president of strategy at News Corp.

Garrett Goodman of Worldcrunch, and collaborator on the Media Innovation Studio’s Interactive Newsprint project, led some inspiring talks about crowd funding along with Rob Wijnberg from De Correspondent, which raised $1.7 million (£2.9 million).

Video journalist and Westminster University senior lecturer David Dunkley Gyimah also spoke on new narratives in video journalism and moving away from traditional packages.

Clare comments: “It was also great to share laptop space with the walking newsrooms that are Alistair Reid and Sarah Marshall and the Twitter guru Juliette Posetti.”

UCLan funded nine students to work as volunteers at the festival, which was an inspiring and challenging environment. Their work can be seen here.

Some of the UCLan team